In Anglo-European botany, it is customary to think of the vernacular as that which is not a Latin or Latinized scientific plant name. In Unmaking Botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez traces a history of botany in the Philippines during the last decades of Spanish rule and the first decades of US colonization. Through this history, she redefines the vernacular, expanding it to include embodied, cosmological, artistic, and varied taxonomic practices. From the culinary textures of rice and the lyrics crooned to honor a flower to the touch of a skirt woven from banana fiber, she illuminates how vernaculars of plant knowing in the Philippines exposed the philosophical and practical limits of botany. Such vernaculars remained as sovereign forms of knowledge production. Yet, at the same time, they fueled botany's dominance over other ways of knowing plants. Revealing this tension allows Gutierrez to theorize "sovereign vernaculars," or insight into plants that made and unmade the science, which serves as a methodological provocation to examine the interplay of different knowledge systems and to study the history of science from multiple vantage points.
Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
A Note on Orthography, Terms, and Formatting ix Introduction. Sovereign Vernaculars 1 Part I. A Botany at Its Most Defined 1. An Asymptotic Taxonomy 29 2. Scientific Statecraft 55 Part II. Science in a Place of Flux 3. Ubiquitous Sampaguita 85 4. Woven Transformations 107 Part III. Assembling a Wider Expanse 5. Field Labor's Menace 135 6. The Latin Babble 159 Conclusion. Of Place, Moment, and Source 183 Acknowledgments 199 Notes 205 Bibliography 235 Index 273
"Examining the intersections of colonization, science, and nature, Unmaking Botany innovatively illustrates how botany in the colonial Philippines was shaped as much by scientific ideals and transimperial agendas as it was by science's own epistemological limitations, internal disagreements, and nomenclatural instabilities. With this argument, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez draws important attention to how imperial science and knowledge systems are inflected by particular historical contexts, social contours, epistemologies, and material structures. A landmark work." - Sophie Chao, author of (In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human Becomings in West Papua) "In this remarkable history of imperial botany, Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez shows how the colonial project of Latinizing plant species was constantly tripped up by the persistence of vernacular names and practices among local populations, destabilizing the very systematicity of the botanical project. Through its beautifully written and finely crafted examination of the complexity of imperial botany, this brilliant and timely book will speak to a wide range of readers in science studies, colonial studies, Southeast Asian and Philippines studies, American studies, and beyond." - Vicente L. Rafael, author of (The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte)
